Seven Angry Candidates

“Listen!” Jimmy McMillan, candidate of the Rent Is 2 Damn High Party, said in the gubernatorial debate Monday night. “A child’s stomach just growled!” And an adult’s mind just reeled. McMillan, who wore a black-and-white tie and black gloves and talked as much about rent as one’s neighbors always seem to, was one of seven candidates on the stage, and it may say something about the level of discourse that by the end the most politically established of them, Andrew Cuomo, seemed to be trying to ride on McMillan’s charm coattails. (“I agree with Jimmy—the rent is too damn high!” and then, as McMillan reached out a gloved hand, a slight recoil by Cuomo and a muttered “all right, all right.”)

Given the lineup—there was also a Libertarian; a Green; the Freedom Party candidate (a city councilman, whose main, rotely recited issue was racial injustice); Eliot Spitzer’s former madam; and, of course, Carl Paladino, who sets the standard for outbursts (see Samantha Henig’s chart) and yet is somehow the Republican Party’s candidate—there were thoughts that the evening could explode. (The Times this morning said, “The potential for shock, revelation and self-immolation are all high.”) That would almost have been better. Each of these candidates, with the arguable exception of McMillan, was a type, and a dull exemplar of that. Kristin Davis, the madam, made the requisite sex-industry jokes, but despite her call for balancing the budget by bringing in pot dealers and casino operators she was like an ill-trained high-school debater, constantly checking her notes. One of the few surprising elements of the debate was that it took until closing statements for someone (Cuomo) to mention the Yankees.

They were united on certain points: everyone hated the M.T.A. (Join the club.) Many of them threw in clichéd sayings. Cuomo may have won in that respect, with both “if you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere” and an old Native American proverb about borrowing the earth from our children. The discussion about hydraulic fracturing that followed was one of the more substantive of the night, even accounting for the moment when McMillan revealed himself to be a supporter of such drilling, whatever the environmental costs—on the grounds that it would help New York become an “independent” state, a process that would also require McMillan to “bulldoze mountains.”

It was about at that juncture that Warren Redlich, the Libertarian, tried to illustrate his contempt for bureaucrats by referring to a corrections board. “A ‘deliberative body’—that means they talk.” True, the candidates were not doing a good job of illustrating the value of talking. Still, Redlich and his counterpart on the other side of the near-mainstream, Howie Hawkins of the Green Party, may have acquitted themselves best, or at least in a way that was both thoughtful and true to their constituencies. Redlich ended one answer by demanding to know who owned a parking lot that was the source of campaign contributions to Cuomo; when the moderator, moving on, said “Mr. Paladino?” one almost thought she was asking if he owned it. (Paladino looked up, startled awake, and talked about something else.) It wouldn’t have been so crazy: Cuomo and Paladino, for a good part of the debate, sounded a lot alike.

There were differences: On the question of gay marriage, for which the moderator requested a yes-no answer, Paladino was the only no, with an abstention from Barron and a “The Rent Is 2 Damn High Party feels if you want to marry a shoe, I’ll marry you.” And one had the sense that he would.

Paladino didn’t seem too angry; but then he didn’t seem all that engaged. His mode was detached contempt, like a guy determined to get through a family gathering at his in laws. (Indeed, he slipped out near the end, reportedly to look for the bathroom.) “This is a rebuttal?” he asked a moderator at one point. “Heh huh. Heh huh.” In other words, Don’t get me started. The questions never really did. At the end, when Paladino talked about how he held politicians to account and then added, “That’s why they call me crazy,” one wasn’t quite convinced.

Was anything in this debate convincing? Maybe when McMillan said, “As a karate expert, I will not talk about anybody up here. Because our children have nowhere to go.” Nowhere to go: when it comes to looking for a politician one can feel really good about in New York, that may be true.